Rambling: A Haven for Nightmares

[moribound]

This is just some rambling about my time playing Minato in Haven, so I can sort out what I did right/wrong etc. and how to go about portraying him in other situations especially in regards to patterns to avoid in Cereals.

Okay, so to start with an important question is whether Minato has PTSD or not given that he exhibits a lot of the symptoms (Flashbacks, repression, lost memories etc.) in the movies and he also deliberately avoids the Moonlight Bridge in the game itself. The source material hasn't said anything conclusive, and in any case it's pretty unlikely that he would have gotten a canon diagnosis due to the stigma of mental illnesses in Japan and strong evidence that his fosters didn't care about him at all- as such I wouldn't go as far as to say "Yeah, he has that" but the symptoms are there if he encounters a situation traumatic enough to make him relive what he went through.

The rest will be underneath a cut, with a content warning for depression and suicide because this is pretty damned heavy stuff.


Minato's issues first reared its ugly head during the anniversary event, which happened slightly more than three months after he'd arrived. He was in Group 2 at that time which had the task of locating a man named Stefan, and they were invited to stay at his underground bunkers for a time- the people there were refugees from the original Haven he had managed to save, and they learned a lot during their stay.

Anniversary Plot (September 2014)

Everything was fine until the Fire Nation attacked Hyoubu decided to spoil everyone's fun by starting a fire and getting the residents to kill each other since he was one of the secret villains involved in the anniversary plot. Minato tried his best to save the refugees but he was too late to do anything for most of them, recklessly running into burning buildings to check for any survivors. In the movies it's shown that the death of others is a big trigger of his, and it didn't help things that a furious Stefan told him that his life would be taken for all the lives lost if the group lingered- being from post-game makes Minato more likely to want to sacrifice himself, and it made him sad that he couldn't.

There was a period of time between the fire and expulsion, which gave Minato time to recover and think about the fire; would he or anyone else be able to capture or kill the person responsible should things come to a head? It took him quite a while to decide rationally that he would do it if it came down to him since he was already dead and that would mean no one else would have to dirty their hands...except rational he certainly wasn't when it turned out that 1) Hyoubu was the culprit 2) Hyoubu hypnotized his friends and nearly got them to kill his other friends and 3) Hyoubu was damned well going to kill everyone unless someone did him in first- oh, and the only people available for the fight was Minato, Superboy and Alphonse.

Which is not to say Minato wasn't calm and collected at first when he discovered that Minako had been hypnotized. What really made him lose it was a severe injury that should have killed him, which ironically proved to be Hyoubu's undoing as there were no telepathic thoughts to pick up while he was engrossed in fighting off the other two; this fight was handwaved but as I imagine it Minato would have suddenly struck back with enough force to break through Hyoubu's barrier and stun him, only to be followed up with Minato running him through with his sword. The last thing Hyoubu would have seen was how wrathful Minato appeared and if you know the canon of ZKC is just ripe with dramatic irony.